One Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven-bullets in the Back.
The killings have become so commonplace nowadays that there is hardly a point in detailing them one by one, even though each story needs to be told.
Do you recall when the American Government would feign interest in human rights? You remember that, oh, so you do read and, you do pay attention. Yup, they started a war in Iraq under the guise of bringing Democracy and human rights to an old country. One that has survived and thrived for thousands of years, long before there was any thought of something called American Democracy, but I digress.
Okay, so I went too far back, so let us leap forward a couple of thousand years.…… For those of you who served in law-enforcement in Jamaica, some of you read. You will recall when the Americans used their state department to castigate and penalize tiny Jamaica about alleged law-enforcement abuse?
Ok then, if you are able to recall those events, you will also recall that even as they demonized the JCF for what they characterized as [extrajudicial killings], their over 18’000 police departments pretty much investigated themselves and still do to this day, they operate outside of any independent’s agencies ability to investigate their operations, and the Government itself placed itself above all international bodies that would monitor the use of force by law enforcement agencies around the world.
That blatant and arrogant stance by America in placing itself above international laws is not confined to police use of force, it also applies to the International court of justice that they have been instrumental in setting up in the Hauge after the second world war.
After the court ruled that the United States’ covert war against Nicaragua was in violation of international law (Nicaragua v. the United States), the United States withdrew from compulsory jurisdiction in 1986 to accept the court’s jurisdiction only on a discretionary basis.[9] Chapter XIV of the United Nations Charter authorizes the UN Security Council to enforce Court rulings. However, such enforcement is subject to the veto power of the five permanent members of the Council, which the United States used in the Nicaragua case.
In other words, the United States by its actions, placed itself and the powerful veto-wielding members of the council, above international laws.
No American politician, or other leaders from any western white-run nation that may have violated international law have ever been arrested and charged, much less brought before the Hauge Tribunal. Are we to believe that the only Politicians who break international laws are black and brown ones from Africa and the Middle East?
I can think of a few that aren’t black or brown who has been accused of committing breaches against international laws and they are moving around freely with nary a care in the world.
Not a single one has found themselves before the International court since the Germans did after the second world war.
Instead, only Black and brown leaders have been dragged before the court, literally rendering it devoid of legitimacy.
As a consequence, some African Nations have removed their countries from the authority of the court. The biased & arrogant nature of the American’sactions has jeopardized populations around the world, making them vulnerable to abuse by despotic leaders.
If their leaders are not subject to international laws who will hold them accountable?
Oh, I forgot, the Americans will bomb them into obeying American dictates.
But this is not about America’s arrogance on the international scene, at least not in this article, it is about American police who operate nationally, yet outside any accountability from inside the United States or the outside world.
Over a decade and a half ago the FBI warned about KKK and other white supremacist elements infiltrating law enforcement.
This is in addition to the fact that American police departments have always been agencies of death and oppression to the black community.
The American Government to date has done nothing worthwhile, outside of what the Obama Administration did in getting a few departments to enter into consent-decrees with the US justice department with a view to implementing some measured reforms.
In other words, the head, which is the Government (the Dog), cannot get police, (the tail), to comply with the laws, much less best practices. So in this dystopian Orwellian existence, the tail wags the dog.
There are a couple of elements at play here, (a) Qualified immunity: This is a doctrine literally created by the United States Supreme court, that protects government employees from exposure to civil actions when they are acting on behalf of the state.
Qualified immunity doctrine gives government officials broad — if not entirely limitless — protection against federal lawsuits.
The Supreme Court held in Harlow v. Fitzgerald (1982), “government officials performing discretionary functions, generally are shielded from liability for civil damages insofar as their conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.”
In practice, however, qualified immunity can protect truly egregious conduct by police. As the Supreme Court put it in Malley v. Briggs (1986), qualified immunity “provides ample protection to all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law.”[vox]
The convoluted standard that would make one such employee liable to civil action by an aggrieved party is that he/she would have to have known that his/her actions were so egregious and that there was established precedent in a case already decided similar to the one being brought.
Simply put, if there is no similar case already decided by the courts that match the one a defendant wishes to pursue, there is a greater chance of a snowball surviving in hell, than that case prevailing. In other words, the Court gave police carte blanche to do whatever they want without consequence.
(b) Police Unions are so powerful that Mayors Governors and legislators are petrified to cross them, so the country is virtually locked in a mafioso vice-grip in which it’s citizens are being murdered by the state but the politicians are powerless to do anything about it. Politicians are beholden to the police Unions because they accept money from them during their campaigns. In fairness to them, it is a difficult problem, if they refuse their support they have to face an electorate that idolizes the police with the criticism that they are anti-law ‑enforcement.
Because of that, Powerful police unions in big cities like New York can pretty much do as they please outside the lines of what the duly elected Mayor or council members like, and be as disrespectful as they want to them without consequence.
At the end of the day, the Mayor will crawl back to the Union, tail between the legs, heaping praise on the union that had just heaped disdain and disrespect on him or her.
© White Americans generally glorify and worship police, primarily because police have always been oppressive toward Blacks. Getting a majority of whites to acknowledge that there is a police problem in America is a tall order because of their hatred for their Black neighbors.
(d) Additionally, the white nationalist in the white house encourages law enforcement not to be kind and gentle to people they arrest.
He did so as he addresses law enforcement gatherings across the nation. A couple of law enforcement agencies pushed back against his advice, but the vast majority of them yucked it up, as he made those statements.
Who do you think were the people he was telling those state-sanctioned abusers to be brutal to? Do Do you think they were white people?
To date, nothing has been done about the FBI’s warning.
Police will continue to kill Black men, it is okay by the white house, it is okay by the supreme court, it is okay by the Republicans in the US House & Senate, it is okay by Republican Governors, Mayors, and Legislators, It is okay by prosecutors and it is okay by a whole bunch of white people.
(e) All across America, there is a plurality of white people who have no problem with police killing Black people, their parents and grandparents attended lynchings and gleefully enjoyed them.
Months ago it was George Floyd in Minneapolis, Derrick Chauvin knelt on his neck until he was dead. Yesterday it was Jacob Blake in Kenosha Wisconsin, seven bullets to his back. They do not even pretend that the person they shoot had a weapon anymore. It is okay according to white juries and courts to shoot Black people, what the hell do they care if they are shot in the back? What do they care about how many times they are shot, or where the bullets land?
The cop who shot Jacob Blake decided when he pulled the trigger seven times, that it was okay to shoot him in the back. That is textbook policing.….… his union will come out saying that he had a warrant or that he was reaching for a weapon so the coward who fired the seven bullets is justified under the law.
They will trot out the criminal record they made sure he had from he was in school and that will be justification for what happened to him on Sunday, August 23rd.
Mike Beckles is a former police Detective corporal, businessman, freelance writer,
he is a black achiever honoree, and publisher of the blog chatt-a-box.com.
He’s also a contributor to several websites.
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